Swedish researchers have created an intuitive illusion of having an invisible body among people in the lab and demonstrated that the invisibility feeling changes people's response to physical stress in challenging social situations, The Washington Post reported.
In the study, researchers put 125 subjects into virtual reality headsets.They then asked the subjects to look down at their bodies. When the participants looked down at themselves, they saw blank space instead of their real bodies. Researchers touched subjects' body in several locations with a paintbrush while the empty space of their invisible body in virtual reality was also touched with a paintbrush. The combination of seeing and experiencing was sufficient to get most subjects to accept the illusion.
Arvid Guterstam, lead author of the study, said that they demonstrated in a previous study that the same illusion can be created for a single hand. He further said that the current study shows that the invisible hand illusion can be extended to an complete invisible body.
To show that the illusion really worked, scientists changed the virtual paintbrush into a virtual knife, the subjects thoughtlessly reacted in fear. The bodies of participants were invisible, but the threat was actual. Their skin got sweaty and their heart rates increased.
In a follow-up experiment, the researchers placed the subjects in front of a big crowd of people to examine whether the invisibility feeling affects social anxiety.
Guterstam said that they found that the self-reported stress level and heart rate of participants during the performance was lower when they felt the illusion of the invisible body.
Scientists expect that the study results will be of importance to future clinical research, according to Business Standard. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.